For miles men were pegging out their claims and prospecting the country; the claim was usually named after some peculiarity of the spot where it was situated or through something peculiar about the man who owned it. The next claim to where I with others dug a hole twenty feet deep for no purpose whatever, excepting to make it soppy with our perspiration, was called “Apples’ Claim.” The miner who owned it was always taking oaths and saying “As sure as God made little apples.” And so it got its name. My old man of the sea’s claim was called “The Great Unwashed Neck Reef.” Some had poetical titles named after the anxious girl in some far-off land who waited the return of her lover with the great fortune, which generally arrived with a thousand kisses in a long letter and an earnest request for her to make a collection, send out the amount for a fare home by steerage passage, and a postscript imploring for no delay as death might end the suspense.
On my claim worked three others, a Scotch fellow named Burns, and “Smith” and “Birth Mark.” Smith and Burns were quiet plodding men, who breathed heavily with hope as they shovelled away. “Birth Mark” (which was only a nickname) was a kind of Don Quixote and swashbuckler mixture, and as he turned the windlass over our heads and drew the buckets of earth up as we toiled in the shaft below, he would talk to us for hours without stopping, telling us of his grand pedigree, how he was of Norman blood and the soul of honour; so honourable was he that he was only a poor man through scorning to be a party to a dishonourable action. It was wonderful to hear of the great opportunities that had come his way and how he had let them all go by through his conscience dwelling upon some tiny point bearing on the question as to whether it would be right and proper for him to take the fortune offered, or to toil as a poor man. He would blow his chest out and gaze upon us as though we were much beneath him. I put up with his vulgarity because he had lent me the ten shillings for my “Claim” licence and taken my violin as security.
He would sit by the camp fire by night and tell us all the details of his home life in England. He had left his wife in the old country and seemed terribly spiteful about it. “Middy,” he would say to me, “she was a real bitch, my wife was. What would you have done with a wife that wanted all the say and never got up till twelve o’clock in the day, and when you complained over the late breakfast struck you over the head with her boots?” I pitied him and told him so, and so did all the miners as he gabbled on, though we all envied that English woman comfortably tucked up in bed till midday in old cold England. A lot of the fellows looked shocked at such laziness and it would have done your hearts good to have seen the tremendous indignation on the faces of those miners when he told us that he crept home rather suddenly one day and caught the young lodger on the top attic examining the blue birth-mark under his wife’s knee. He told us of his rage and of his wife’s indignation over his rage, till the whole camp roared with laughter and from that night he was known as “Birth Mark” and was so thick-skinned and thick-headed that he answered to the rude sallies and that nickname with pride, firmly believing that they all sympathised with him over that story. I got to like him somewhat, for his mighty swagger was intensely amusing and harmless enough. He camped with me for a long time, helped us in digging the shafts, and also in the dry blowing, as we prospected for surface gold in the bush for miles around.